He also sets up the standard of honesty and honour in face of Oriental despotism, which British officials have always been expected to maintain. His statement, too, of the need of carefully selected presents, shows that the old practice seen in the Old Testament scriptures still existed in Asiatic negotiations. The Company’s servants found themselves from the first obliged both to give and to receive them, even despite the Company’s orders, and in 1773 “a talent of silver and two changes of raiment,” i.e. a Kelaat, was the recognized gift of the Mogul’s messenger. The account of a “Court” meeting of the East India Company’s Committees in London gives a glimpse of the regular course of their work in dividing gains, etc., and has an especially interesting note of the way they conducted their relations with the King, their debtor, through the mediation of a famous courtier. Captain Rannie’s evidence, as a Company’s military officer on the spot, is striking as showing how the struggle between Dupleix and Clive in the Carnatic had reacted by alarming the Nawabs of Bengal; and, again, in tracing their hostility further to the interference with trade and its dues, on which, perhaps as much as on land-dues, the ruler’s treasury depended. These were the grievances which caused our later troubles with Mir Jaffier and Mir Cossim, our own nominees, and they were not ended till Warren Hastings, with twenty years’ experience as a trader, came to govern and to reform them in 1773. Life of T. Raymond The chief value of these extracts lies in the insight they give into the domestic life of courtiers, of an ambassadors’ suite, of common soldiers and officers on campaign, of the utter ruin of the population at the seat of war. This is an interesting commentary on the condition to which most of the German states must have been reduced during the incessant campaigning of the Thirty Years’ War. A Court Leet Both the origin and name of courts leet is obscure; they were possibly survivals of the Anglo-Saxon hundred courts, seem to have a popular origin, and were certainly the courts in which review of Frankpledge was held, and other petty police work done. Dugdale’s “History of Draining”